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Thursday, 30 September 2010

Addressing History launches as beta site

So here's the shape of things to come - the Addressing History project has just launched a beta site at http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/. This site has one heck of a lot of potential so well worth exploring and providing feedback on.

The site basically links street directories and contemporary maps for three years - 1784, 1865 and 1905. You can search for individuals and locate them on the maps, as well as see the corresponding Post Office Directory entry on the relevant page at the Internet Archive.

The potential of this is simply enormous, and if successful, the project partners at the University of Edinburgh, JISC and the National Library of Scotland are planning to extend the concept across Scotland, utilising the info from some 400 directories from 1783-1912 currently being digitised for the Internet Archive (www.archive.org).

We are still in Beta/preview so there will be a few small things to fix and we will be adding significantly more documentation to the site before we launch fully.

MerRhosyn, I wanted to agree with Chris' response to your question: we hope that AddressingHistory will be able to expand at a later date but this does depend on the success of this initial tool. Please be patient and do let us know what you think of the site and the way it works as this will help us to refine how the site works ready for later expansion.

Finally, to complement the Beta URL, I wanted to share the URL for the feedback survey for the AddressingHistory Preview - we would welcome any feedback, comments and suggestions here:

https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/addresshistorypresurvey

Anyone who would like to be alerted when the full launch takes place can also sign up here:https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/ahlaunch/

Thank you again to anyone reading this - your interest and support for AddressingHistory means a great deal to all of us on the AddressingHistory team ;)